Books: After Victory

This is a first novel. Angry and intense, it is half sharp-eyed,
unsparing war reporting and half fast-moving, self-consciously
hard-boiled fiction. It is the story of what happens behind the lines
of a typical Italian town in the confused interlude between war and
reconstruction when the Germans have been driven out and the Allies
have come in, when the fascists are out of office but the civilian
governments have not yet been set up, and when the high aims for which
the war was fought disappear...